Resettled Refugee Youth Leveraging Their Out-of-School Literacy Practices to Accomplish Schoolwork

This ethnographic study explores how three resettled refugee teens leveraged their out-of-school literacy practices to accomplish their schoolwork. As teens drew upon their out-of-school literacy practices, such as translanguaging and social media practices to make sense of homework, they created third spaces wherein they strategically merged their literacies to achieve their goals. This research provides implications for how educators can design learning environments that enable teens to do this type of complex work.     

Co‐Present Conversation as “Socialized Trance”: Talk,Involvement Obligations,and Smart‐Phone Disruption

In an era where digital and co‐present involvements become entangled, the role of face‐to‐face conversation now vies with mediated communication. Applying insights provided by Erving Goffman, we explore conversational interaction and consider how engrossing face‐to‐face conversation can be understood as a form of socialized trance. We explore how this interaction represents one type of “involvement obligation” that can become disrupted and, increasingly, uniquely impacted by mediated involvements that are enabled through mobile and “smart” devices. The crux of the argument is considered in the context of a burgeoning digital era where conversation is found to become meshed together in uneven ways with mediated interaction. We highlight the efficacy of Goffman's approach with regards to the current information environment, providing insights into how engrossing conversation and its involvement obligations are impacted by mediated interactions and how breaches of conduct are experienced. A video abstract is available at https://youtu.be/ulL8mMN4oig .     

2008 NETSL Conference—Cohabiting and Colliding: Print and Electronic Resources

Abstract

This report discusses the program of the 2011 New England Technical Services Librarians (NETSL) annual spring conference, held on Friday, April 8 at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts and entitled “2020 Vision: A New Decade for Technical Services.” NETSL is a section of the New England Library Association and a regional group of the American Library Association.     

The effect of female migration on infant and child survival in Uganda

This article uses data from the 1996 Uganda Demographic and Health Survey to examine whether migration of women improves the survival chances of their children to age five. We expand on prior research by testing not only the hypothesized positive effect of rural-urban migration, but also the effects of other migration stream behaviours on child survival. Results show that up to 10% of children die before age five and within-group differences in mortality exist among urban and rural children depending on their mother's migration status. Only urban-urban migration was significantly related to child survival, compared to rural non-migrants, after controlling for other factors, although other streams of migration (rural-urban, urban-rural, rural-rural) were positively related to child survival. Generally, migration explains a small component of the variance in child survival. Several other factors, including parents' education, household size, household headship, mother's age at birth, duration of breastfeeding, and place of delivery have a significant predictive power on child survival.     

Priority: Home! A true priority? An analysis of the Federal Plan to Break the Cycle of Homelessness

Homelessness pervades every fabric of American society: it has plagued individuals and families, young and old, males and females. This paper analyzes and discusses the feasibility of a current proposal, Priority: Home? The Federal Plan to Break the Cycle of Homelessness, and the intended effects of its policies pertaining to the homeless. Specifically, the plan outlines the need for a continuum of care, a concept which promotes three stages to attain self-sufficiency: emergency shelter, transitional housing, and permanent housing. Providing support services and follow-up care are contingent on the success of the continuum. The plan therefore describes a comprehensive solution to address homelessness and requires that all levels of government participate in the process.     

The Timing of Family Instability and Children’s Social Development

This study extends the growing literature of family instability by investigating the significance of its timing for children’s social adjustment. We find that more than a third of the 1,364 elementary school children in the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development experienced some family structure change. Their cumulative level of family instability was associated with multiple indicators of social development at the end of elementary school, associations that were especially strong for boys. These associations were driven largely by the lasting effect of family change in early childhood, demonstrating the significance of early family instability for children’s later social development.     

Maternal and Paternal Parenting Style Patterns and Adolescent Emotional and Behavioral Outcomes

The purpose of this study was to extend current research to examine the relationship between parenting style combinations and adolescent emotional/behavioral outcomes to further understand affective functioning in adolescents. Previous research solely analyzed mothers, without including fathers and/or both parents. The roles of temperament and adolescent and parent gender were also examined. Participants were 12- to 18-year-old students (n = 195) in 7th to 11th grade in a rural school district in southeast Michigan. Temperament characteristics (i.e., mood, flexibility-rigidity, and eating rhythmicity) explained nearly half of the variance in adolescent outcomes. Parenting styles contributed a smaller but significant role. When both parents were authoritative, it was associated with more optimal outcomes in adolescents' personal adjustment than any other parenting style combination. Having one authoritative parent, which was expected to be a protective factor, was related to high personal adjustment for girls but higher levels of school maladjustment for boys. Mixed associations were found for parenting style combinations and adolescent outcomes. Overall, when both parents were permissive and neglectful, these parenting styles were associated with poorer adolescent outcomes. Study findings confirm that parenting style patterns are important; however, adolescent temperament plays a much larger role, overall, in adolescent affective functioning.     

Sleep Quality and Alcohol Risk in College Students: Examining the Moderating Effects of Drinking Motives

Abstract

Objective: Sleep problems and alcohol misuse are common issues experienced by college students that can have detrimental effects on overall health. Previous work indicates a strong relationship between poor sleep quality and alcohol risk in this population. This study explored the moderating effect of drinking motives in the relationship between global sleep quality and experience of alcohol-related negative consequences. Participants: College students (N = 1,878) who reported past-month drinking. Methods: Participants completed online surveys assessing sleep and alcohol-related behaviors. Results: Poorer sleep quality and higher drinking motives (coping, conformity, and enhancement) predicted greater alcohol-related consequences, controlling for drinking. Further, coping motives moderated the relationship between sleep quality and consequences such that participants reporting poor sleep and high coping motives experienced heightened levels of consequences. Conclusions: These findings advance the understanding of the relationship between sleep problems and alcohol-related risk and provide implications for targeted campus-based health promotion interventions.     

Partial publicity and gendered remembering: figuring women in culture and performance

This essay brings representational issues of female publicity into recent discussions about space, community and memory. Cultural analysts in a variety of fields have used these concepts to foreground the radically contextual and socially embedded nature of artistic production as well as to incorporate psychic and material notions of representation into the analysis of the political. I argue that such conceptual work is implicitly gendered, something made clearer by asking feminist questions about the function of memorial space in imagining publicity. To focus an interrogation, I investigate one disciplinary strain within cultural studies: theatre and performance studies. Throughout, I position performance – both theatrical and social – as an exemplary site with which to investigate the linguistic, spatial, and embodied practices of culture. Such forms expose the gendered operations of language, space and gesture as well. Furthermore, the field of performance studies has produced theoretical paradigms that derive from larger theories of memory and space. By thus positioning it as both a site of culture and a site of cultural theory, I argue that performance can illuminate the tacit gendering of culture more generally. My investigation of publicity and civic memorial will build upon three relatively recent examples of civic performance in Chicago: the performance of First Lady at the 1996 Democratic convention, the 1996 inauguration of the Jane Addams Memorial Park in Chicago, and the premiere of Chicago-born playwright David Mamet’s The Old Neighborhood in 1997. I frame both Chicago theatre and other kinds of Chicago performances as different types of civic memorial in order to speculate on relationships amongst different types of genres. More importantly, I illustrate the different ways that women function allegorically and indirectly as vehicles for imagining publicity and for lamenting its failures. My examples suggest how women – living and/or memorialized, ethnically marked and unmarked – can figure paradoxically as the object blamed for the loss of extended affiliation even as (conversely) they are also blamed for its ‘unnatural’ public promotion.